Agito looks to cut international roaming calls

Agito Networks has tapped into the growing need to reduce enterprise mobility costs by rolling out a voice over 3G application.

The company said that offering enterprise voice over 3G, a feature of the company's RoamAnywhere 4.0 platform, would provide particularly benefit organisation who pay hefty international roaming charges.

"Eight of ten potential customers who contact us are primarily concerned with reducing the international roaming charges," said Pejman Roshan, Agito Networks chief marketing officer. "For a typical enterprise user, calls will take between 30 to 50 meg of bandwidth - that's a considerable saving on cost for the voice calls."

He added that the company ensured voice quality too. "3G is a very hostile environment, you're dealing with an uncontrolled network" said Roshan. "We have a host of tools to improve the audio quality. We're using very low bit rate codec that doesn't transfer data for example. For additional security, we're also encrypting voice calls."
The new system offers support for a variety of devices including iPhone - a device that wasn't previously supported by Agito - and the new Blackberry Bold9700. The company has also launched a new router capable of supporting up to 10,000 users within an enterprise.

The product got the thumbs up from one user. Mike Martelli, senior manager at engineering company ARINC, said "W have about 700 smart phone users, and many travel around globe and end up with significant monthly cellular bills - some are several $1,000s each month. We investigated many different options, but Agito's focus on eliminating international roaming charges made it very attractive for us. Once we have this rolled out to the majority of our users, we believe that we will see cost savings of the order of $50,000 to $100,000 per year."

The new platform will be available some time at the end of March, beginning of April said Roshan.